Parched Earth and The Stillborn: 

Subverting Patriarch's Notions of Womanhood

Charles M. Mustapha Kayoka (ckayoka@yahoo.com)

Dip. Ed, B. A. (Ed), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The Open University of Tanzania

January, 2002

1.0 Introduction

"Do women write differently?" (Eagleton: 1990) Although one unanimously accepted answer to this question is unavailable, generally critics of literature, for instance Brown;1981,Ongudipe-Leslie:1987, say that women write differently. This question forms the main quest of this essay. At the very outset I also wish to advance that, indeed, women write in a different fashion from that of men when they deal with issues concerning their own experiences as mothers, wives, girls, mistresses, writers to name but a few of their sexual and gender typologies. The two novels this work explores, The Stillborn (1988) and Parched Earth (2001)*1 by Zaynab Alkali (Nigerian) and Elieshi Lema (Tanzanian) respectively, provide evidence that women literary writings, at the thematic and ideological level, introduce a different literary tradition from that of the male writers we are so familiar with. Firstly, women, maintains de Beauvoir (1949), write in order to assert their very being and demonstrate their creative capabilities. For Spender (1986) for the eighteenth century woman the writing act was by itself an act of defiance seeking to regain autonomy, a new form of existence for long denied to women: "to write was to be; it was to create and to exist. It was to construct a world view without interference from the "masters." Secondly, womenr writing is a form of reaction, resistance to meanings of womanhood provided by the dominant class, the man. Through women writings we acquaint ourselves with first hand accounts of what constitutes womanhood. We get to know what constitute the woman's sensibilities, reactions, and views in a heterosexual relationship, aesthetics, politics, sex, etc. Then we get to know whether the woman's self-perception and self-identity complies with, or negate the definition of womanhood advanced by male writers and literary critics, male protagonists and other characters, or even female characters fashioned by male writers. For Chukwuma (1989) African women writing helps fill the "gender gap" in the post-colonial writing project dominated by male writers and to present completely different women characters from those fashioned by men. "The Rural, back-house, timid, subservient, luck-lustre woman has been replaced by her modern counterpart, a full-rounder human being, rotational, individualistic and assertive, fighting for, claiming and keeping her own." Ogundipe-Leslie (1987) adds that, among other things, the women's literary project in Africa mainly aims at answering such questions as "what is a woman? What is being a woman and what is the nature of womanhood." Brown (1981:20) presents that same line of thinking when he writes;
What I am suggesting is that writing about women and their men, these writers emphasize that the experience, identity, and role of a woman are all distinguishable from a man's, in culturally definable terms; that there is a greater pre-occupation among these writers with what they conceive to be the limited roles of women; and that one these counts such women have produced a body of literature that is distinguishable from male mainstream, which is often the only presumed subject whenever we think or write about African literature..."

And this is the fact of contemporary literary history! Ostriker (1986) says that in the western world, the white woman wrote because she cast doubt on the definitions of "'woman' and, 'womanhood' and 'woman poet', not initially created by herself and accepted with complex and changing mixes of acquiescence, evasion, rebellion, and misery." In turn, the African-American woman literary writers' reason to write is also an act of resistance. They are "rejecting the definition imposed by experts ("all male") and resisting encouragement to locate themselves in the emergent definitions of woman by white feminists." (Wall :1990). African-American women view themselves as unique category of citizens. First of all they experience the racial discrimination and domination as blacks; then as an oppressed class as women. Thus their concerns cannot be the same as those of the white woman. They have to redefine their situation in consideration of the double beating. 
Thirdly, the other most conspicuous aspect is that of making women their central characters (and in some cases the only characters), with men lurking in the distant background, and if at all they appear front stage they hardly assume a protagonist role (see for instance Farida Karodia's A shattering Of A Silence (1993), Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price (1976), or Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter(1981 ), to name but a few works by African women writers. The fourth difference arises from the fact that with locating women characters on the foreground, and giving them a space of their own and a voice to articulate their concerns, readers are afforded an opportunity to look at how women analyze, from their own perspective, their state of affairs, their relationship with men, and how they relate to the social, economic and political structure of their society. We get to hear the "other" voice speaking. With that, in the final analysis, our perception of reality becomes a product of our acquaintance with the woman's own interpretation of the reality. 
Editorial remarks of the African Literature Today (No: 15: 1987) argue that with all the pretence of being knowledgeable of the African culture, and by extension, the African woman, African male writers are either "not willing" or "have failed in their promise to present an authentic image of the woman, from a woman's point of view, resorting to familiar, non-dynamic women images and that their treatment of issues that most deeply concern women- issues such as polygamy, childbearing, motherhood, the subordination of the female to the male- has been jaundiced." 
One is tempted to say that the two novels under study provide yet another opportunity whereby women characters fashioned by women writers are exploring issues of marriage, heterosexual romance and sex, motherhood, the woman's body and liberation. This essay attempts a quasi-comparative analysis of treatment of gender relations depicted in two novels. Although they do not have much in common in terms of plot structure and characterization, they all deal with three important aspects; first is the realization that the woman is living under the oppressive patriarchal system dominated by man and that the hopes that women's lot will be improved when they get married should be discouraged forthwith; the second aspect is the quest for ideological reforms towards a society free from gender inequality. Thirdly, we are informed that for women to succeed, they do not only need to revise their view of male-female relationship but also the terms for entering that relationship. In the view of the protagonists, marriage is but a disempowering institution for women.

2.0 Childhood Dreams Shattered

The hungering for, and the naivety towards, marriage displayed by the protagonists and other women characters in the two novels prove quite well the commentary by de Beauvoir (1949) that, "marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society. It is still true that most women are, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being. The celibate woman is to be explained and defined with reference to marriage, whether she is frustrated, rebellious, or even indifferent in regard to that institution." But all that women end up with once they get into the institution is frustrations and dehumanization. The authors of Parched Earth and The Stillborn try to tackle the issue of gender relations and disillusionment experienced by the heroines of the novels, Doreen and Li respectively, who are engaged in heterosexual romantic affairs and marriage. Young and full of life the two girls overflow with hopes for a blissful, and permanent romantic relationship with the men they look forward to becoming their husbands. The commentary in the introduction to The Stillborn presents the view of marriage in Li's mind thus,
She wants to be able to establish a relationship with her husband based on the understanding of their being equal partners and not on the traditional master-dependent relationship that has so badly soured their first attempt at married life (p.viii).

For Doreen the presence of her husband around is the good enough insurance for a happy existence in her marital life. She tells readers that, " ... I comforted myself with the thought that as long as Martin was by my side and ready to marry me, nothing was going to worry me." (Parched Earth: p.65). The naivety in most young marriage-and-heterosexual-romance-craving women let them think in the same myopic patriarchal lines that as long as man provides adequate material support to his wife or have satisfactory sexual sessions, it is enough guarantee for their romance and marriage to subsists (this the view that the two novels set out contest), as says Faku, Li's childhood friend; "When a man cared for his family, fed and clothed them properly, what was it if it wasn't love."(The Stillborn: p.46). Faku is not bothered if her husband becomes polygamous as long as marriage relieves her of the domestic chores at her mother's homestead, takes her away from the village life, and raises her status as a married woman. But as the fate would it, and as the title, The Stillborn, suggests, such hopeful dreams of the three girls are shattered, are stillborn! The novels advance that there is more than material provisions that a married woman should desire from a man. With Doreen, the initial romantic bliss, up to the time they have their first baby girl, Martin's (her husband) own philosophical pronouncements, and his seemingly gender conscious behavior during their honeymoon, provide her with an assurance that their heterosexual relationship and romance will subsist on the pillar of equality and mutual emotional benefits. Li's case is even more disappointing. Her four years of waiting to rejoin Habu, her husband, who stays in Lagos, cherish an expectation that their reunion will be flowered with mutual happiness and lasting romantic and sexual attraction. That dream is deferred;
Four years she had yearned to be in her husband's house. She had dreamt of the moments when she would cook his meals wash his clothes and cuddle him to her breasts. Such moments are rare now. The meals she cooked remained uneaten as his homecomings became later and rarer. And whenever he was at home, the former lion of the village was unapproachable as an angry god...she remembered her first day in the city. After much difficulty in locating the house and the shock of paying a staggering amount of money to transport her load from the motor park to her destination, Li had found an unsmiling welcome awaiting her... At first she was pleasantly surprised to see the change in Habu. He was much taller and more robust, his clothes were clean and fitted him well. Li felt proud of him but extremely shy in his presence. She longed to talk openly and touch him, but it seemed that Habu wasn't feeling a similar emotion...Li had felt humiliated... Li didn't see her husband again until the evening of the next day.... Li served Habu a meal, but he said he wasn't hungry. He looked greatly agitated. She tried talking to him to re-establish their former bond between them, but he remained indifferent. She could still remember clearly that the first time he had desired her was the night he had come home drunk and violent. Even then, she found a flicker of happiness in the drunken intimacy. 
She bent her head and hot tears trickled down her cheeks, "Where is my man?" She wailed, silently....This wasn't the man she used to roll with on the sand in front of her father's compound. The man lying on the other side of the room was a well-dressed stranger who did not talk to a village woman. She held her breasts and her sobs stabbed deeper and deeper into her heart. (The Stillborn, pp. 69-70).

Li is disillusioned! Her friend Faku, who thought romance and love were inconsequential in marriage is in even more serious trouble, and disillusioned as well! Garba, her husband, does actually become polygamous. And does not at all bother to see Faku for days in a row. When Li meets Faku again after several years of separation she can hardly recognize her once closest confidant. The narrator explains the scene thus;
Li removed her slippers at the door, saluted and entered. She stood still at the entrance and stared at the gaunt-looking woman before her. For a brief second, she thought she was in the wrong room. The gaunt woman rose slowly from the mat where she was sitting and advanced doubtfully towards Li. She, too, was obviously unsure. But as she drew nearer, she recognized Li and smiled openly. Li's face lit up as she rushed into Faku's open arms.... Li had recognized Faku as soon as she smiled, revealing the once beautiful dimples. They clung to each other and sobbed for a long time....
'We should be dancing for joy, not sobbing, " said Faku, blowing her nose into the end of her wrapper...
Faku walked out and Li watched her go. She could not believe this was reality. How could this near-stranger be her friend Faku? Famished in body and no doubt famished in soul?... Much later, they sat on the mat and talked over the past. Both avoided talking about the present as if it didn't matter to either of them..." (The Stillborn: pp. 77, 78-79) (Emphasis mine)

Indeed Faku and Li would not talk of the present which is full of, disillusionment, anguish and sore emotions. The present does not signify any of their childhood dreams, it is but full of sorrows! It is the same sad story for Doreen, the central character in Parched Earth. She says, "
And so withdrawal started like a thin crack on the wall of our life. I watched it grow and widen. I was helpless, unable to mean something that I did not determine alone. He started coming late, armed with excuses- the workload in the office; the friends with a problem that only he could solve; the tiredness, first generally, then in bed; and finally, outright indifference. Passion, that was like a tonic in our life, withered. I felt like an ugly, shrinking part of my body. The absence of it singed like fire on the skin.
The mood in the house changed, naturally. It became downcast and depressing. The house was always dark somehow, as though the windows were no longer adequate to bring in enough sunlight and air, (Parched Earth: p. 150).

3.0 Existence Under the discriminatory patriarchal system

Ultimately both protagonists, Li and Doreen, become aware of the incapacitating power of the oppressive and discriminatory, male-dominated, system they were living under as married women. Doreen fully realizes now that the system administers differential treatment between boys and girls with the boys enjoying more privileges. Boys get more share of the food, eat more beef than girls do. Doreen's perspective on the unequal gender relation and women's discrimination in her society becomes more mature after meeting and making friends with Joseph, a divorced intellectual, fine artist and diplomat. Joseph's philosophical ideas enlighten Doreen on the meaning of patriarch and its centrality in understanding gender relations: She says; "A window of understanding opened in me, and I knew; Oh yes, boys are as special as fathers. That is when I realized that I had supported my mother in upholding a system of favoritism I had been unaware of. I was her accomplice in this process of shaping life, building attitudes and manners even without my knowledge. This realization was so painful it made me cry. I was filled with guilt and shame." (Parched Earth: p. 85) (Emphasis mine)

Unlike Doreen, Li's awareness and knowledge of the unfair treatment of girls and women by the patriarch is product of her own perception, and that awareness becomes a weapon for self-empowerment and rebellion. Again unlike her sisters and friends in the village who are not enlightened and take matters for granted, Li becomes aware and critical of the patriarchal order at her family, at the village, and in the society in general. At home, "she felt trapped and unhappy," (p. 3). She goes about challenging the oppressive atmosphere and the discriminatory codes which impose on the girls, social, spatial and temporal restrictions. As an act of rebellion to these codes Li dances the "heathen" dances which her religion Islam, forbids them to. One day she escapes into the night to go to a dance session where she wants to meet her boyfriend, Habu. When her father discovers a hole on the fence the next day, he demands to know who went out the night before. Sule comes to Li's rescue by "admitting" that he did for he longed to be at the dance arena. His father does not punish him. And the reason is that he is a man;
What worried him now was, what was he to do with this man-child? He was a man now and it wasn't just his age, but what he stood for. He could beat Awa easily if she erred, no matter how old she was, but not Sule, his firstborn malechild. And to beat a man for going out to dance at night was outrageous. He decided to give him a chance to apologise. That way both could salvage their pride. (The Stillborn: p. 23) (Emphasis mine).

Doreen in Parched Earth laments over similar differential treatment based on the sex of the children. That while girls sexuality is restricted as they are not allowed to get involved in sexual ventures without the society sanctioning, while boys are not equally restricted (p. 94). Boys do not experience similar stringent restrictions as do girls on assumption that they belong to a superior, much privileged gender category- men. With Li, the atmosphere at home was "worse than a prison," (p.3). Her law abiding elder sister, Awa, reads Li's open challenge to the code as characteristic of non-believers, heathens. Li is not cowed down by the verbal reprimands from Awa, she defiantly says,
Let me be heathen... I'd be much happier. At least I could go ease myself without having someone breathing down my neck demanding to know where I have been to... what kind of life is this anyway? And you, big sister, so content with it? (p.3)

And Sule, the boy, adds,

'Yes, it is a rotten life... Look at you, eighteen years old, still at home, single, not allowed to go out at all except to the market, the riverside, the prayer house and the school. Even then you are always watched... Not to talk of being bossed by a cruel headmaster at school and an irate father at home. (p 3).

Doreen's knowledge of how patriarch organizes itself becomes mature when she gets more of the teaching of her now more intimate friend, Joseph. All along Doreen nurses an uneasy feeling that some phenomenon operates against her own personal welfare and that of other women; that the monstrous phenomenon makes people define their individuality in relation to the codes set by it and that the unruly elements in the society who seek a free, separate space, "are marked as deviant and sometimes mad." Joseph reveals to Doreen that this phenomenon is patriarch, which he correctly defines as a,
".... Social system which has defined how men and women will relate in all spheres of life, including private life, right down to the way we love and have sex. It has determined how a father, brother, husband, uncle will treat the woman- the wife, sister, mother, and daughter related to them. It is an ideology that has given the man the authority to decide, to act, to give or withhold, to access or retain anything, really, almost everything. It is complex. (Parched Earth: p. 182)

May be the other very important aspect drawn to our attention by the two novels is women's complicity in their own oppression by men. That is, consciously or unconsciously, women assist men to uphold an unjust gender system, and participate in restricting and silencing fellow women who want to exercise the limits of their natural liberties like, sex, speech and movement. Women in Parched Earth cruelly punish Doreen's mother, when she was still young, for declaring that she fell in love and got carnal experience out of wedlock; Li faces similar restrictions and public bashing when she wanted to use her sexuality in manner not decreed by the social order; when women step-out of the behavioral limits set by the social order, they are bashed by other women who think it is more womanly and divine to remain at the receiving end of the man's sense of justice; lack of common stand between Martin's mother and her co-wife and thus engaging in constant fighting over the attention of Mr. Patrick, their husband; Doreen talks of how her counselor disapproved rebellious tendencies among some women that will "unfairly" subvert the man's supreme role and status at home; that to be a good mother she should be able to balance her domestic chores with that of her teaching profession. One of the women said that, "my husband is my pension," meaning that a woman does not need to worry of her existence as long as she is assured of material support from the man. 
At some stage Doreen asks, "why don't women rebel against servitude and the very subtle oppression from the male order," (p. 202). Birkett and Harvey (1991) say it is not as easy for women to summon enough efforts to unshackle themselves from patriarchy. They say, "getting into the madhouse is easy enough; a simple matter of following determined paths, without looking further than the ends of one's feet. Getting out requires a different kind of determination, harder to come by." Doreen's experience provide an ample case to prove the above contention. Had it not for Joseph's enlightenment, whose appearance into her life is like a deux ax machina, she is completely at loss. She is not as resourceful as her counterpart, Li. But one reason that makes women unable to come up with the strength to self-liberate is the material weakness common among them. Secondly, the demonstrated lack of ideological unity among women in the novels is another factor. Which is in line with de Beauvoir's view that as long as women continue to identify themselves with the male ideology and want to be identified in relation to men, they will remain ideologically dispersed, and unable to forge a common understanding to topple patriarch, their oppressor.

4.0 Muting the Woman

Doreen in Parched Earth draws readers' attention to an aspect of natural and constitutional liberty rarely dealt with by other characters of novels and plays by both female and male African writers. Freedom of speech and opinion! Her association with Joseph made her note the major difference between her husband and the former lies in the fact that with her husband she is not given a space to have her voice heard. Doreen says whenever he is with Joseph she feel free to speak without competing with him for a space to air their views. Joseph does always lend an attentive ear to her when she speaks until she empties all that she has in her mind. This makes her realize that a good heterosexual romantic relationship demands the partners to know that the other person has the right to speak as well. With Martin and all other men she happened to relate with, this was not the case, and she says,
In most of my life, I have listened to men talk, say things to me that they believed in or did not like; things they did or planned to do and how. They have wanted me to listen but not comment or give my opinion and I have obliged. I became privy to their dreams and how they realize them, starting with Godbless, who had dreams I identified with as if they were mine, all the way into adulthood, with Zima who planned his family with me in it, even martin, the headmasters of the schools I have taught in, the various men friends I have had. They have always talked to me ... Joseph made me wonder if the men ever thought I could add anything of value to their plans, dreams, opinions, and if they didn't they why would they talk to me at all? I have observed that while women tend to talk with each other, men talk to women; they tell them things. Men think about what is best for women, they generate ideas which women internalize. Men create a life for women to live in and enjoy themselves and this makes women get attached to them. I suppose that is how a woman's voice is killed, gently, so that there is no resistance or even complain when they find themselves voiceless before men" (Parched Earth: pp, 187-188)

She further says that her women counselors on the subject of marriage had always insisted that women should not be the people for making decisions at home for that is a preserve of their husbands. "Why should I make decisions when I had a man to make them for me?" That is the reason men are the de-facto heads of household, and any woman who usurps that role are said to be women who "want to domineer, always wanting to be heard and boss the man around... A woman loved her husband and showed it by trusting in what he did, what he said, and what he made of himself. A good woman hid her distrust and doubts in her heart, fighting them like a good soldier fights to defend a cause laid out by a leader..(p.157)." Doreen's realization echoes the analysis by Leeuwen et al (1993) on how culture succeeds to make women a "muted group". They argue that women denied of speech are denied of an important element of their humanity! But most cultures render women mere listeners, not speakers of their own experiences and that of their societies in general. They say any attempt by women to assert their speaking capabilities contributes to the women struggle for reclaiming the expropriate element of their humanity. They advance that by remaining mere listeners women learn "to undervalue rather than overvalue themselves." They show that culture has direct and indirect mechanisms for muting women. Direct mechanisms include legislations, cultural codes or habits that prevent women from entering public spheres, creation of all male organizations and decision making bodies without, or with very minimal women representation that make women's' view not heard.
Indirect muting assumes various dimensions but the most notorious is the calling of names of all women who try to compete with men in speaking or when they try to assert their views. General sexual harassment and making discussion of certain topics by women a taboo. Aspects of indirect silencing of woman are quite abundant in Parched Earth. When Doreen's mother's premarital sexual affairs with Sebastian is made public, both her father and mother (in conspiracy with other women) would not want to hear their daughter's side of the story. She is cruelly punished, by having her thighs burnt with a hot metal, when she declares to them that she loves her boyfriend. When already a school teacher, Doreen is punished by her admirer and colleague, Zima, for not accepting his proposal for marriage. The whole community isolates her without offering a space to her to explain why she chose another man to marry instead of Zima. The verbal exchange bellow shows that Zima was not ready to hear what she wants to say when the woman discloses her intentions to marry another,
"What? Who? What are you telling me? ...So you do not care about me at all? You do not even have shame to tell me in my face that you are in love with another man? I have waited for there years for you!... Doreen you are behaving like a common prostitute! You are sickeningly fickle! Honestly, what has happened to your good sense." (Parched Earth: p.44)

Doreen is punished for making a choice on the kind of man she will allow to access her privacy and body. She is all of a sudden called a prostitute, fickle and insensible simply because men have self-given right and power to call as such any woman who do not agree with their terms. This is verbal silencing! As if the insults above are not enough emotionally bruising, Zima conjures up a plot to punish Doreen for exercising her liberty without the consent of patriarch. He falsely accuses her before the headmaster for not attending her classes. In an all-male team-work between Zima and the Headmaster, Doreen finds herself unable to field a defense. And she says, " So he stood by his story and I stood by mine, aided by silence and sullenness...He relied on the moral support of a fellow man to understand his case."(p. 45) And the whole school community of joins hands with patriarch in punishing her by spreading unfounded wild rumors against her personality.
Since culture denies women a space to articulate their concerns, says Doreen, they have resorted to "guerilla" strategies for survival in marriage. The strategies are quite dehumanizing and fix women in perpetual state of worry and uncertainty. When Doreen is unable to give her husband the most desired baby boy, her aunt, Aunt Mai, tells her that culture gives women two opportunities in such circumstances. If it is the woman herself who is barren, then she finds a woman for her man with which he will have babies and "the children will call both women, "mother". The second alternative is establishing extra-marital affairs when it is learnt that it is their husbands who lack the power to give their women babies (p.162). As for the first alternative the woman has to brace herself up for troubles brought about polygamy, and as for the second the woman has to humiliate herself and demean her womanhood, all in order to please the wishes of her man. Both alternatives are adopted only to satisfy the man's ego at the expense of the woman's happiness and respect. In a society where marriage and getting children is the major craving men hardly realize that the demand impose on women undue strain. If, at times, men come to learn, as Aunt Mai, that some of, if not all, the kids born into a marriage were fathered by another man for the husband's seeds are not fertile enough, why should men not stop insisting on kids as a factor for women's continued stay in marriage. One would take this as a substantive enough reason for men, the society in fact, to redefine terms of heterosexual relationship.

5.0 The Woman's body

The woman's body, as far as Parched Earth is concerned, have three major functions. First it is the only capital that the woman enters with when she enters in a heterosexual romance. Doreen, as do most women, realizes, when she was preparing for Martin's visit, that it is her body which she should prepare to welcome Martin with. All of a sudden she becomes a narcissist, falling in love with her own body, spending most of her times looking herself in the mirror and trying to identify any particular aspect that has especially drawn her suitors attention. She says, "I asked the mirror's reflection, "whose face is that? Whose eyes"... I looked at it in a new way. I wanted to feel it, touch every part of it, because it had attained magic that pulled my eyes to it, " (p.58). Ealier on, when she said, "I saw him when I looked at myself in the mirror." (p.41) The main reason that makes women develop special attachment to their bodies is that the society, and men in particular, judge the worth of a woman based on the appearance of the woman's body and the services it can render to the man. The woman would like to exert her influence and assert her existence using her body, it is because that is the only facility the society has trained her to use for that end. Women, as maintains de Beauvoir (1949), would cease to develop narcissism if the society evolved other qualities with which to measure her worth. It is the woman's body that is used as an expression of the man's subsisting emotional, romantic, attachment to her man. A man who no longer cares for his wife romantic desires is exposed by his wife's body becoming unbearably too thin and unhealthy, or becoming too plump and ugly due to depression and overeating, as Faku and Doreen demonstrate respectively.
Secondly the woman's body is the instrument men use to quench their sexual desires with. Although is not conspicuous in both novels but it is quite evident at the start of the romance between Doreen and Martin that the later wanted to use the first day to satisfy his primordial desires even when he had not yet expressed her intentions to her. And Doreen, on learning of the pending visit by Martin's feels that sex is the only she can use to express her love to Martin, "felt myself ripen as a strong sex urge washed over my senses like a heat wave." (p. 41)
Secondly, the woman's body is a reproductive machine that has to perform in rhythm, quality and quantity superimposed by the patriarchy. When Doreen and Martin initially plan to have four babies she hardly understands that she is imposing a measure of performance on her own body. And that failure to perform up to that standard will jeopardize her status as a married woman, which actually happens! She falls out of Martin's romantic favor when her body fails to deliver the other three babies, at least one baby boy.
But Doreen seems to invent a strategy, a thesis in fact, that women can use for liberating themselves with, that is the woman using her body and biology as weapon. Although she fails to elaborate her thesis and demonstrate how it can work she seems to be close to a discovery that if women used the power of their biology, their bodies may become effective tools of liberation. This will only be done if women do not allow men to control their bodies and sexuality. Her mother, she says, "had reached a realization that her strength, and the basis for her life and happiness, was in the value of her labor. She nurtured us to believe the same. She had learned also that a woman's sexual life must be hers, to own and control, utterly. So, the men she slept with were not, could not, be part of our life. That is how she managed it... By keeping the strictest distance between them and the center of her life (p.121)."

6.0 Marriage, Sex and Children

The life stories Li and Doreen make us realize that children, sex and marriage are central if we are to understand the predicament women face in heterosexual relationship. That the woman's continued state of subservience lies in her acceptance of codes of conduct imposed by the man as far as the three aspects are concerned. 
Sex: Doreen would like readers take of sex as an aspect that should encourage genuine emotional attachment and a spirit of complementarity between man and woman. She realizes that in most cases the woman's sexuality is exploited by men at the expense of her own pleasure, emotional and physiological consequences. Zima, her teaching colleague, presents the opposite, supposedly patriarchal view of sex. For him the sex act should be seen as an aspect self sacrifice, with one person trying to satisfy one's partner even if one is not emotionally attached to him or not satisfied himself/herself. That it is possible to find someone else who one does not even love, to quench one's sexual thirst with, when one finds that the partner he loves is not capable of satisfying him. Doreen sees this kind of sexual encounter as unnatural. She wants love managed by true romantic feelings.
Both The Stillborn and Parched Earth see the woman as unnecessarily forced to abide by marital sex. Pre-marital and extra-marital sex are forbidden for women. Li was nearly beaten up by a group of irate village women who suspect her of having affairs with their husbands. Doreen's mother is booed at, ostracized by the society and her family when she conceives out of pre-marital sex affairs, and excommunicated by the church whenever she gets a baby out of wedlock. But this code does not apply to men with equal force. In fact, men have no similar restrictions,
...you see, women and men do not have the same choices. A man can say; I want my marriage, I love my woman, so I will try to strike my luck elsewhere. In that, a man has a choice to bring home the child born outside marriage, after a certain time. Or, he should take the other woman as a second wife. Women cannot do that,.. (Parched Earth: p. 159).

The double standard applies even in pre-marital sex. Using the example of her mother Doreen said that while her brother were allowed by culture to engage in pre-marital sex, she was not; since "that if they both engaged in sex, nothing would happen to them." Culture dictates that for the woman, sex is necessarily marital and for reproduction. The woman's chastity is specially insisted because it will honor the parents and boost the ego of the husband. The boy's unchaste behavior is approved, considered manly, therefore condoned.
Marriage: In a study of the works by, Buchi Emecheta, the Nigerian woman novelist, Chukwuma (1989) maintains that "the truest test of the woman continues to be the marriage institution. In this closed-in arena every married woman is to fight out her survival as an individual. The marriage paradox lies in the fact that it is both sublimating and subsuming. Through it a woman attains a status acclaimed by society and fulfils her biological need of procreation and companionship. Through it too, the woman's place of second rate is emphasized and too easily she is lost in anonymity to the benefit and enhancement of the household." ,The patriarchal culture decree that the woman's self-identity and existence is decided in relation to marriage. But, in line with Chukwuma, the characters in the two novels demonstrate that a married woman's existence in that institution is tough. There are lots of problems, material and ideological, she has to contend with. First and foremost, we are informed that it is at the level of the family that the gender division of labor, along strict traditional genderized codes, is more conspicuous and observed. Harvey and Birkett (1991) say the social-cultural arrangement is such that, "the man is assigned to the sphere of authority, the woman to the sphere of reproduction." In that case, in the marital home, the woman's operating base is the kitchen. It is her excellent culinary skills that will sustain his husband romantic attention for as Doreen says, "the home is the hearth, the place where the woman makes fire and cooks herself into the husband's heart. Don't people say the road to a man's heart is through the stomach," (p.72). Thus according to Doreen's sister-in-law, a woman's centrality in the family is gauged only with her reproductive and nurturant capabilities. 'Women are the pillar of the home. Women raise children and men." (p. 44). 
The two novels demonstrated also that the family is a place where sexual and gender power politics are at play. A man is free to return home at time or completely disappear for days in the end as he pleases, can decide to eat or not to eat the food cooked by wife, can decide to have another wife or a mistress, without the wife saying nothing in protest. The woman is forced to change her identity either through adoption of her husband's name, e.g. Mrs. Patrick from Doreen Seko. The woman slides from public to a private realm. Moreover it is insisted that the relationship between man and woman should not be seen in overt emotional attachment and physical intimacy. Women should avoid accompanying their men all the time, they should not be possessive. They should take home as a place where men only come to eat, sleep and make children.
Although Foibe Seko, Doreen's mother, names her children after her surname, Seko, culture demands children be identified by the name of the man. Although a child is known to be a woman's reproductive labor, culture refuses to accord the woman the right to possession of that product. It does not allow the woman to name them after her even in such cases when a child is a product of the woman's secret extra-marital affair on realizing that the husband's seeds cannot make the woman conceive. Because of this ideological coercion Doreen feels privileged to have her kids a father to name after.(p.67) His brother, Godbless, loses his bearings and feels a lesser human being for being born into a fatherless family, pressurizing his mother to show him his father.
However, towards the end of the narrative we are told that marriage cannot subsist merely on the strength of the man's material success, consistency and skills in lovemaking. These factors alone are inadequate to make a woman happy and stay in a marriage. Justine, Joseph's wife, elopes with another man, despite her twenty two years in marriage and her husband's material success and professional success.
Lastly, Doreen's and Li's experiences provide a red traffic sign that women should be very careful when contracting for marriage. They indicate that a woman courts the gravest danger if she enters the institution head on. At the beginning Doreen erroneously thought that, "marriage is like walking in the rain, in the cold wet season., without an umbrella. You get soaked through to the skin before you know what's happened. You get possessed by the rain...Then, you are imprisoned in that state.. the choices are hard...That state tends to invite other threats, disease, loss of reason. The choice open to you is one: walking on." (Parched Earth:141). Doreen would have to admit that she went on walking in the rain because at the time of courtship she did not have the requisite arsenals to guard herself with against the patriarch's onslaught. First it is clear that Doreen's entry into heterosexual relationship was almost done unconsciously for there was a "daemon" who was instructing her what to do, as she says "something else, not my mind, took over and guided the rationality of my actions.." (p. 59) Secondly, in presence of Martin, Doreen felt possessed, and stupefied, thus unable to be pro-active in stirring the affair into a direction amenable to both. She does not think of what role she will actively play when she finally meets Martin during the first visit, we only see her imagining things that he would do to her, not her do to him, when he comes. 
Children: Chukwuma (1989) also says that "... by far the greatest test for a married woman is bearing children. Her entire life and happiness depends on this." And this is true of Doreen and Faku(in The Stillborn). At the initial stage of marriage union children become a bond between married couple. The planning to have children, and their ultimate coming, bring about an exhilarating experience between man and woman and they feel close together. But children are a divisive factor as well. The demand on a certain number of children, at a certain speed, and a preferred sex, impose on woman undue pressure she most of the times fails to cope up with. And marriage breaks apart, in turn.
In both novels male children are the preferred and most favored sex. Gobless and his young brothers at home used to get a larger share of food, unlike their only sister. Sule, Li's brother, and only son in the family, cannot be beaten by his father, for he is man.
For Doreen and Faku, the neglect and consequent frustrations their experience is due to their inability to produce many children, males children particularly for Doreen, fast. Thus the woman is punished by the society and the family for not being able to perform her reproductive duty in line with society's expectation. 
Children born outside the marriage arrangement, the only reproductive set-up accepted, by the dominant ideology becomes a curse over a woman. Both the woman and the children become outcasts. The society and the family reject them, and the woman is excommunicated by the church. A similar punishment is not meted out to the man who has been an accomplice in making the woman pregnant out of wedlock. And that "sin" hangs over the woman throughout her life time. 

7.0 Strategizing Woman liberation

After waiting for Habu, her husband, for five years in the village, Li, the central character in The Stillborn, finally sees it futile to invest ones hopes in a man who neither nurses genuine romantic feelings towards her, nor supports her and their child materially. She ultimately come to her senses and says, "who says a husband makes for a guardian or a father?... A woman who takes a husband for a father will die an orphan." (p. 85). The statement an open subversion of a patriarchal training women get since childhood that their patience for marriage and dependence on men will salvage them from neglect and destitution. When her elder sister laments over their state of being unmarried, with the villagers laughing behind their backs, in a way proposing that they should go back to their husbands Li says, "may gods forbid it!.. The day a woman begins to woo a man has not yet come and if it has, it will not begin with me (p.83)." But what should women do now after this realization. Guthera, the reformed former prostitute-cum-bar-maid 
in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Mitigari (1987), says, 
"Yes, I have not been satisfied with the kind of life I have been leading. You see, my entire life has been dominated by men, be they our father in heaven, my father on earth, the priest, or all the men who have bought my body and turned me into their mattress.
What I really want to say is that most of the things I have been doing so far have not sprung from my being able to choose. I have been wearing blinkers like a horse. Yes I have never done anything which I came from free choice. I've been moved here and there by time and place... I would say that there is no woman who does not really know the pressures that we women live under.
What is troubling my thoughts is this; Once a person knows, what does she do about it? Is it enough for me to just say that now I know? I want to do something to change whatever it is that makes people live like animals, especially us women." (Matigari: p. 140)

Guthera asks a very crucial question here! "Once a person knows, what does she do about it? This is the question Li and Doreen, the protagonists in the two novels, attempt to answer in order to provide strategies for unlatching the shackles of patriarchal domination. Li finally realizes that it does not pay for women to go on leaning on men for material support and existence. She also realizes that the highly desired emotional and psychological bliss heterosexual relationship promises to provide to women is anchored on the ideological and structural strength amassed by men. As one of the strategies to subvert that dependence syndrome, Li decides to join a teachers' training course, with a dream that one day she will be able to provide for herself and the family and do the same things that men do- like building a house, sending children to school, and more importantly become her own boss. The narrator indirectly suggests that for women to liberate themselves they need to acquire the same tools that men use to dominate them- education and paid employment, that is only when they can re-negotiate their relationship on equal terms; That once they gain that power, they will be in a position to re-negotiate terms of their relationships. The dialogue between Awa and Li shed more light on Li's views,
Awa shook her head thoughtfully 'You are going back to him?"
"Yes."
"Why, Li? The man is lame," Said her sister.
"We are all lame, daughter-of-my-mother. But this is no time to crawl. It is time to learn to walk again"
"So you want to hold the crutches and lead the way? Awa asked.
"No," answered Li.
"What then, you want to walk behind and arrest his fall?"
"No. I will just hand him the crutches and side by side we learn to walk." (The Stillborn: p. 105)

Li, as Doreen in Parched Earth, does not profess total disengagement from men, nor ruling out the possibility of reforming the oppressive patriarchal system within the institution of marriage, that is why she decides to go back to her husband, Habu. In her view, which is also supported by Joseph, Doreen's man-friend, both men and women need to un-learn the old gender ideologies before they are made to adapt to the new situation. Joseph, thinks that as very necessary because, in the current gender set-up, neither men nor women, benefit. We all are victims. Joseph advances two proposals for liberating the woman. The first is that of the education and training option for women. That once women have the education power, they will storm into profession once considered men's only. And they will use the newly gained knowledge and material power "to generate information that has influence over" other women; that women need to own property and stop being appendages of men for their existence and survival; they need to enter politics to become part of the decision making bodies, to have their voices heard. Secondly, if we are to reform the system efforts towards that goal should target both men and women, since only sensitizing the woman on the oppressive gender realities around her, and the need to liberate herself will not bring about the desired and effective change faster, hence Li's proposition that she and Habu will have to learn walking again, and this time, 'side by side" with her.
Doreen has several other propositions for engendering woman liberation. First she advances the lesbians' notion that women true liberation will only come if they form cooperation among themselves, completely disengaging themselves from mechanisms that coerce them to from union with men. This is the idea brought about by her mother;
I understood her clearly much later, after I was married. I came to know that my life as a woman would be realized ultimately, and in so many ways, in relation to other women. She meant that my life would always be a landmark for a girls growing up, or for others needing a role model. She was telling me that my life must strive to give meaning to others (women) needing it. When my life dissolved into Martin's family life, so easily, like sugar dissolves in water, I realized with a pang, that my mother was saying that I will always live out my struggles in relation to other women, women's lives and their perceptions of it, their society and their niche in it, their relations with men." (Parched Earth: pp. 49-50)

Doreen tried to practice that approach when she formed the River Pebble Club which her colleagues and other women used to create teaching materials for their pupils. But for other women the space was used to sanction patriarchal views of heterosexual relationship and to disqualifying women who want to usurp the masculine roles of men in family. Many pages later Doreen's friend, Joseph, presents a view that gender revolution in a society will only be realized when the society is made to acknowledge patterns of social and sexual intimacies other than heterosexism. Joseph says,
But you know what is really shaking the earth? You know what ill finally throw patriarchy off board totally; it is society allowing and accepting that, yes, a man can need another man and a woman can need another woman as intimate partners. It is society saying, yes, these alternatives can co-exist with the norm, the woman-man norm, they can make a family and can raise children. That, in my opinion, is the beginning of real change in the organization of human society.

8.0 Conclusion

One should warn, however, that not all women writers fashion their art, and discuss the gender relations different from the way male writers do. African literature is abound with artistic works by women writers touting the oppressive patriarchal system. It is only those women writers aware of the negative gender dynamics who militate against the woman's welfare, and fashion their art differently from that of male writers. The novels discussed in this work, obviously, are products of women writers who are aware of these retrogressive tendencies. Their writing shows that they had set themselves a mission to offer the society with an alternative view of the gender structures that we take for granted, as if they were divine. Indeed they offer to readers, women and men, a woman's perspective of the heterosexual relationship, and in this way, attempting to subvert those gender notions advanced by the dominant male ideology. With the liberation strategies that Li and Doreen have charted out, we find some radical departure from other strategies we are used to. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for instance, is of the view that the woman's lot will improve only when the society makes transition from capitalist to socialist social and economic formation. But in this case, women find that liberation of the woman will be realize only when the man is transformed into accepting the woman as his equal, and the society accepts to co-exist with some gender relations hitherto considered culturally subversive. Moreover, Li, does not wait for a man to enlighten her on the oppressive realities around her, as does Guthera. From the start we meet Li who is aggressive, adventurous, in a head on collision with the patriarch, but she would not go far since her struggle is a lone one, lacking the support of both men and men.

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Notes:

1 Alkali, Zaynab (1988) The Stillborn, Hong Kong, Longman.
Lema, Elieshi (2001) Parched Earth, Dar-es-Salaam, E & D Publishers